When it comes to the design of your website, you need to consider more than just the physical appearance of the site.
Research shows that if a website is hard to navigate round, for example, then visitors will tend to go elsewhere as they do not want to spend time hunting round a site for the information they want. Designing a website is all about the user experience. If users like the site then they will stay on it, return and possibly even recommend others to it. Now a day’s most people are going for clean and contemporary sites that have all the information to hand and have calls to action to show visitors how they can either buy a product or service or contact the business if that is what is required. I believe it is important to try and follow a theme throughout your site so no matter what page a visitor is on they can easily get back to the home page for example.